: Unusual drop in traffic I've had a software development portfolio/ blog for a few years with Google Analytics installed on it. I'm not really that bothered about how much traffic the site gets,

@Jessie594

This sounds to me like a Google Penalty issue.

A sharp decline such as what you have shown that has lasted for 4 months the way your graph shows, in combination with your assertion that greater than 95% of your traffic comes from organic searches backs up that statement.

There are two main penalties that you can get. The first is a manual action from the Google Spam team, and the only way to check this is to go to Google Webmaster Tools and see if you have any notification. An example of thew notification you may see could be...


The other option is an algorithmic penalty which is harder to diagnose. By using a site such as moz.com/google-algorithm-change you can see when algorithmic changes have been applied and how the relate to your drop in traffic. Based on the above report I can not see any algorithmic change that may have affected you but that is not to say that your recent change didn't trigger an algorithm alarm.

Backlinks can also cause substantial issues including backlimks from...


Sites that are penalized or banned from Google
Websites with duplicate content
Websites unrelated to your niche
Spammy comments and forum profiles
Sites with thin content
Site wide back links


Over 95% of Google Penalties are related to a websites backlinks.

From what you have said it has started to pick up again and so it could be a temporary ranking issue that has resolved it.

There is the possibility that due to the sites inactivity for such a long time the ranking reduced automatically and that it coincidentally reduced so substantially the day after you posted a new article, but I do not believe that is what happened as the rank increase from fresh content would not take months to apply as has been the case here, this does seem more to do with a penalty.

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